The pros and cons of perfectionism

The goal of having everything in life perfect is hilarious. Nobody has ever gotten anything truly perfect: we just point at some task or some thing that got accomplished and say that was exactly perfect. Watch a figure skater at the Olympics nail a move and call it perfect, and the person next to you might disagree. So might the judge. So might the skater. So who's right? What I'm rambling to say is that perfectionism is so opinionated we can't even fathom what it truly is. There is no factual thing called perfect that every person would agree on. (Ironically, I think that's kind of perfect.)

So why is this titled the pros and cons of perfectionism? Well, it's about this website.

Over the last year, I've written maybe 20 articles. A handful have been published. I started this site using a template from Vercel (still up at phase1.keshavraghavan.com) and posted a couple of times. Then I told myself it needed a redesign before the next article. So I built phase 2 (phase2.keshavraghavan.com). I kept trying to make the site better before I posted, but not for SEO, and not for anyone reading, but so that when people did come to the site, I could feel proud of it. I felt that using the template would make people think I was lazy, and I didn't care for that.

Phase 2 was fine for a couple of months, and then it wasn't.

Last week I had a bad headache and had to take a couple of days off work. I was told to stay off screens, so I went to Half Price Books to look for something to read. I picked up Phototypesetting by James Craig, a book about how design and UX existed in the 70s, told through his own design beliefs from that era. It's one of the most knowledgeable pieces of literature I've ever read.

On Sunday I started redesigning the site to fit Craig's perspective. I kept a few things from phase 2, but for a whole day I barely slept or ate trying to figure out what the key was. (This story has a point, I promise.)

Iteration after iteration, I kept disliking one or two things about every version. And eventually I realized what I was chasing: perfectionism, in my own way. I started thinking about how this was going to rip me away from the actual goal - writing. The site was never meant to be a showcase for other people. It was supposed to be a place where I could relax after long days of meetings, calls, and coding, and type something out, and leave it up for whoever happened to be interested. I shouldn't have been chasing perfect at all.

So today, I know what the flaws are on the site, and I'm going to keep them. As long as they don't impact the reader, and as long as they're just small visual things - they're going to stay.

It's a good reminder. We can build things we love without them being perfect. They have to be great. They have to have meaning, and they have to be solid. Visually there's a smaller tolerance for mistakes, but if the product works, and the user can move through it without extra struggle, I think that it's perfectly fine.

There's a famous saying in software: don't touch the code that's been working in production for years. You'll certainly break it.